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Air quality alert issued for Deschutes County

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Wednesday, August 7, 2024

On Wednesday at 12:06 p.m. an air quality alert was issued for Deschutes County.According to the National Weather Service, "Oregon Department of Environmental Quality has issued an Air Quality Advisory IN EFFECT UNTIL 5 p.m. FRIDAY. A Smoke Air Quality Advisory has been issued. Wildfires burning in the region combined with forecasted conditions will cause air quality to reach unhealthy levels. Pollutants in smoke can cause burning eyes runny nose aggravate heart and lung diseases and aggravate other serious health problems. Limit outdoor activities and keep children indoors if it is smoky. Please follow medical advice if you have a heart or lung condition."Air quality Alerts: NWS prescribes safety measuresWhen an air quality alert is in effect, following the weather service guidance is pivotal. Here are some simple tips from the weather service for safeguarding your well-being:Prioritize indoor stay:If it's within your means, stay indoors, especially if you have respiratory issues, health concerns, or fall within the senior or child demographics.Trim outdoor activities:When venturing outside becomes unavoidable, limit your outdoor exposure strictly to essential tasks. Reducing your time outdoors is the name of the game.Mitigate pollution sources:Be mindful of activities that exacerbate pollution, such as driving cars, operating gas-powered lawnmowers, or using other motorized vehicles. Limit their use during air quality alerts.Banish open burning:Avoid burning debris or any other materials during air quality alerts. This contributes to worsened air quality.Stay informed:Keep yourself well-informed by tuning in to NOAA Weather Radio or your preferred weather news outlet. Staying in the loop empowers you to make informed decisions regarding outdoor engagements during air quality alerts.Focus on respiratory health:If you grapple with respiratory issues or underlying health problems, exercise added caution. These conditions can render you more susceptible to the adverse effects of compromised air quality.Following the recommendations from the weather service helps bolster your safety during air quality alerts, minimizing your exposure to potentially harmful pollutants. Stay vigilant, stay protected, and make your health the top priority.Advance Local Weather Alerts is a service provided by United Robots, which uses machine learning to compile the latest data from the National Weather Service.

On Wednesday at 12:06 p.m. an air quality alert was issued for Deschutes County.

On Wednesday at 12:06 p.m. an air quality alert was issued for Deschutes County.

According to the National Weather Service, "Oregon Department of Environmental Quality has issued an Air Quality Advisory IN EFFECT UNTIL 5 p.m. FRIDAY. A Smoke Air Quality Advisory has been issued. Wildfires burning in the region combined with forecasted conditions will cause air quality to reach unhealthy levels. Pollutants in smoke can cause burning eyes runny nose aggravate heart and lung diseases and aggravate other serious health problems. Limit outdoor activities and keep children indoors if it is smoky. Please follow medical advice if you have a heart or lung condition."

Air quality Alerts: NWS prescribes safety measures

When an air quality alert is in effect, following the weather service guidance is pivotal. Here are some simple tips from the weather service for safeguarding your well-being:

Prioritize indoor stay:

If it's within your means, stay indoors, especially if you have respiratory issues, health concerns, or fall within the senior or child demographics.

Trim outdoor activities:

When venturing outside becomes unavoidable, limit your outdoor exposure strictly to essential tasks. Reducing your time outdoors is the name of the game.

Mitigate pollution sources:

Be mindful of activities that exacerbate pollution, such as driving cars, operating gas-powered lawnmowers, or using other motorized vehicles. Limit their use during air quality alerts.

Banish open burning:

Avoid burning debris or any other materials during air quality alerts. This contributes to worsened air quality.

Stay informed:

Keep yourself well-informed by tuning in to NOAA Weather Radio or your preferred weather news outlet. Staying in the loop empowers you to make informed decisions regarding outdoor engagements during air quality alerts.

Focus on respiratory health:

If you grapple with respiratory issues or underlying health problems, exercise added caution. These conditions can render you more susceptible to the adverse effects of compromised air quality.

Following the recommendations from the weather service helps bolster your safety during air quality alerts, minimizing your exposure to potentially harmful pollutants. Stay vigilant, stay protected, and make your health the top priority.

Advance Local Weather Alerts is a service provided by United Robots, which uses machine learning to compile the latest data from the National Weather Service.

Read the full story here.
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Wildfires in Western U.S. Play a Role in Global Warming, Research Shows

By Carole Tanzer Miller HealthDay ReporterSATURDAY, Sept. 27, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Wildfires are an increasingly common feature of life in...

By Carole Tanzer Miller HealthDay ReporterSATURDAY, Sept. 27, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Wildfires are an increasingly common feature of life in American West, and researchers are working overtime to understand how the resulting smoke affects air quality, human health and climate change."Wildfires do not emit ozone directly," Jan Mandel, a professor emeritus of mathematics at University of Colorado Denver, said in a news release. "Wildfire smoke contains chemical compounds that react with sunlight to produce ozone, often far from the fire itself."In turn, that added ozone fuels global warming.Mandel developed a computer model to gauge the air quality effects of large western wildfires that ripped across the West in 2020.His work with researchers from University of Utah and San Jose State University in California is the centerpiece of a study being published in the November issue of the journal Atmospheric Environment.Focusing on August 2020 wildfires that burned more than 1 million acres in northern California and dozens of smaller fires in Utah and Oregon that affected a combined 400,000 acres, they looked at ozone levels and air quality.Hundreds of miles from the wildfires, in Colorado, residents grappled with smoke-filled skies and repeated air quality and pollution alerts. But the impact didn’t end there, the study found.Not only did these large wildfires pump a large amount of ozone into the air, affecting people’s lungs far from the fire zone, they also added to climate change.For the study, Mandel worked with Derek Mallia of the University of Utah and Adam Kochanski of San Jose State University to model the extent to which wildfire chemical emissions wound up in the atmosphere.The takeaway: On average, wildfire smoke pumps up ozone concentrations by 21 parts per billion (ppb). On top of already high ozone levels in the West, that pushes levels over the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 70-ppb health standard.Exposure to high levels of ozone can cause a variety of symptoms, ranging from coughing to lung and heart disease, and even premature death."Major wildfire events, such as the August 2020 episode, are likely to become more common in the coming decades due to increasing aridity driven by climate change," Mandel’s team wrote. "Thus, improving air quality across the western U.S. during the summer remains challenging," the study added. The results suggest that future reductions in pollution levels may not be enough to offset the effects of major wildfire smoke, especially in summer months. Major fires can emit as much nitric oxide as all other human-caused sources across the western U.S., the study pointed out. Wildfire smoke also contains fine particulate matter that poses significant health hazards."Given the complexity of the underlying physical and chemical processes governing smoke plume transport and chemistry, more research is needed to better understand how wildfires impact the … distribution of ozone," the study concluded.SOURCES: University of Colorado, Denver, news release, Sept. 19, 2025; Atmospheric Environment, November 2025.Copyright © 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Routine Community Screening Catches Undiagnosed Asthma

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterFRIDAY, Sept. 26, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Routine screening can help find kids who are suffering from...

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterFRIDAY, Sept. 26, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Routine screening can help find kids who are suffering from undiagnosed asthma in communities with high levels of the breathing disorder, a new study says.Asthma screening during well-child visits found that more than two-thirds (35%) of children with no previous diagnosis of asthma had at least one risk factor for the disease, researchers will report Monday at an American Academy of Pediatrics’ meeting in Denver.Further, about 24% of kids with risk factors were subsequently diagnosed with asthma, researchers said.Those diagnosed with asthma reported coughing or shortness of breath at night, previous use of an inhaler or difficulty exercising due to breathing problems, researchers said.“Asthma is often diagnosed late or not at all because parents may not think of certain symptoms such as night-time cough or needing to stop activity to catch your breath, as being related to asthma,” researcher Dr. Janine Rethy, division chief of community pediatrics at MedStar Health, a not-for-profit health care provider in the Baltimore-Washington D.C., metropolitan area, said in a news release.For the study, researchers screened 650 children ages 2 and older for asthma during well-child visits performed in a mobile medical clinic between 2021 and 2024. The mobile clinic performed these screens in urban areas with a known high prevalence of asthma.Overall, about 8% of children screened were found to have previously undiagnosed asthma, results showed. Another 18% of the kids had a previous diagnosis of asthma.The children’s home environment likely played a factor in their asthma, researchers found.About 52% of the undiagnosed kids who screened positive for asthma had poor housing conditions — mold, roaches, mice, rats, peeling paint or leaking water.About 38% of kids with a prior diagnosis of asthma also lived in such conditions, results showed.“There are also many environmental triggers in the home that may contribute to these symptoms and which a pediatrician should know about to help understand triggers and incorporate into a treatment plan,” Rethy said.The study shows that more kids with asthma can be helped if doctors and public health experts focus screening efforts on places known to have high rates of asthma, researchers said.“Asthma is highly treatable if diagnosed early and approached with a holistic lens that includes identifying and addressing environmental triggers,” researcher Dr. Karen Ganacias, a MedStar Health pediatrician, said in a news release.“In populations with high asthma prevalence, routine screening for asthma symptoms and modifiable home environmental triggers can be an important first step to improving outcomes and decreasing disparities,” Ganacias added.Findings presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.SOURCE: American Academy of Pediatrics, news release, Sept. 26, 2025Copyright © 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Are Your Fruits & Veggies Hiding Pesticides? New Study Says Yes

By I. Edwards HealthDay ReporterTHURSDAY, Sept. 25, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Eating fruits and vegetables is key to good health, but a new study...

THURSDAY, Sept. 25, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Eating fruits and vegetables is key to good health, but a new study suggests that choosing produce with higher pesticide residues may boost the amount of these chemicals leaching into the body.Researchers linked the types of produce people eat with levels of pesticides found in their urine. The results show that eating foods on the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) “Dirty Dozen” list such as spinach, strawberries and kale was tied to higher pesticide levels than eating items from the “Clean Fifteen,” which includes pineapples, sweet corn and avocados.“We found consuming different types of fruits and vegetables changes your pesticide levels accordingly, with greater consumption of the higher-residue foods increasing pesticide levels in urine more than consumption of the lower-residue foods,” study author Alexis Temkin, vice president of science at EWG, told CNN.Experts said the findings show a clear connection between what people eat and their exposure to different pesticides.“This tells us that we don’t have to measure each person — when people eat a lot of produce with high residues of pesticides, they’re more likely to have elevated levels in their urine,” Linda Birnbaum, former director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, told CNN. She was not involved with the study.The 2025 EWG Shopper’s Guide reported that samples of spinach carried more pesticide residue by weight than any other produce tested. In total, researchers found 203 different pesticides across the Dirty Dozen list. The most toxic mixtures were found in green beans, spinach, peppers and leafy greens, researchers said.On the other hand, papaya, onions and watermelon were among the least contaminated fruits, according to the Clean Fifteen list.Health experts stress that fruits and vegetables should still be part of a healthy diet. Further, if purchasing organic isn’t possible, you can reduce pesticide exposure by choosing more foods from the Clean Fifteen and by washing all produce thoroughly, researchers explained.Pesticide exposure has been linked in previous research to birth defects, heart disease and certain cancers. Children and pregnant women are especially vulnerable.SOURCE: CNN, Sept. 24, 2025Copyright © 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Heart Disease Remains Top Killer Worldwide

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterTHURSDAY, Sept. 25, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Heart disease remains the world’s top killer, causing 1 in every 3...

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterTHURSDAY, Sept. 25, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Heart disease remains the world’s top killer, causing 1 in every 3 deaths around the globe, a new study says.Heart disease, brain bleeds, strokes and high blood pressure were the most common threats to health, researchers found.“This report is a wake-up call: heart disease remains the world’s leading cause of death, and the burden is rising fastest in places least equipped to bear it,” said journal editor Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a professor at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn."The good news is we know the risks and how to address them,” he added in a news release. "If countries act now with effective health policies and systems, millions of lives can be saved.”For the study, researchers estimated the burden of 375 diseases, including heart disease, on the health of people in 204 countries between 1990 and 2023.Results show that lifestyle-related risk factors account for about 80% of the disability-adjusted life years lost to heart disease, researchers said. Disability-adjusted life years is a measure combining years of life lost to early death with years lived with disability, to create a rounded picture of healthy years of life lost to disease.The top risk factors included high body mass index (an estimate of body fat based on height and weight); high blood sugar levels; smoking; drinking; and poor diet, researchers said. Other top risk factors included environmental exposures like air pollution, lead exposure and higher temperatures, they said.Metabolic problems like excess weight and high blood sugar contributed to 67% of heart-related disability-adjusted life years, the study found. Behaviors such as smoking, drinking and poor diet contributed to 45%, and environmental exposures to 36%.“By targeting the most important and preventable risks, with effective policies and proven, cost-effective treatments, we can work to reduce premature mortality from non-communicable diseases,” said senior researcher Dr. Gregory Roth, director of the Program in Cardiovascular Health Metrics at the University of Washington in Seattle.“Each country can find reliable evidence and a kind of policy prescription for better cardiovascular health in our results,” he added in a news release.The study also found that heart disease affected an estimated 240 million people worldwide in 2023; peripheral artery disease, 122 million.Men had higher death rates from heart disease than women in most regions, and risk rose steeply after age 50.The study also showed a 16-fold difference between the countries with the lowest and the highest rates of disability-adjusted life years lost to heart disease.“Our analysis shows wide geographic differences in cardiovascular disease burden that can’t be explained by income level alone,” Roth said. “Given this kind of variation, our findings offer the opportunity to tailor local health policies to target the most relevant risks for specific populations.”SOURCE: American College of Cardiology, news release, Sept. 24, 2025Copyright © 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

The Misplaced Nostalgia for a Pre-Vaccine Past

RFK Jr.’s health policies stem from the idea that the past holds the secret to health and happiness.

The way we respond to the disappointments, dangers, and defects of the present helps determine our political affiliations. If you think the answers lie somewhere in a future condition we’ve yet to achieve, then you may be persuaded by progressive politics; if you think the resources for rescuing society lie somewhere in the past, you may be attracted to conservative politics.This general pattern helps explain the recent alignment of conservative politics and the anti-vaccine movement, despite its long-standing association with crunchy, left-ish causes. Today, the two tendencies have joined in mutual agreement about the wholesomeness of natural health versus modern medicine, indulging in nostalgia for a world before the widespread use of vaccines.The past does contain its share of treasures, and it can be hard to accept that a world so rife with pain and despair is in certain ways the best it has ever been. But the idea that the past held a secret to health and happiness that we’ve lost somehow—especially with respect to infectious disease—is a fantasy with potentially lethal ramifications.[Read: The neo-anti-vaxxers are in power now]Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the vaccine-skeptical current secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, originally shared politics with the older anti-vaccine advocates, back-to-the-Earth types who themselves demonstrated a conservative impulse in their search for a primeval Eden. (Plenty of left-leaning people persist in that tradition, though it seems better fit for today’s right, which has a certain appreciation for the pastoral.) A Democrat until 2023, Kennedy entered public life as a champion of environmental protection, battling against corporate interests in court to keep harmful waste out of the air and water. Over time, this overall concern with modern impurity destroying pristine nature evidently extended to other areas of his thinking. As his career progressed, Kennedy adopted several controversial opinions regarding healthy eating, condemning, among other things, meat issued from factory farms, seed oils, and processed food. In a 2024 campaign video from his presidential-primary run, Kennedy promised to “reverse 80 years of farm policy in this country,” harkening to a time before synthetic pesticides and chemical additives to animal feed.If a conservative is, as William F. Buckley Jr. famously wrote, someone who “stands athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’” then Kennedy certainly fits the bill. A proper conservative fights to preserve the status quo. But the most reactionary members of the right won’t settle for protecting the ground their party has already staked out; their project is to return to the status quo ante, the way things were in the (sometimes distant) past. The slogan “Make America Great Again” manages to disparage the present while promising a return to an era in which Christianity was nationally dominant, manufacturing jobs were the bedrock of the economy, and the country was ever expanding. Kennedy’s positions on processed food and pharmaceuticals fit perfectly into that picture.“Today’s children have to get between 69 and 92 vaccines in order to be fully compliant, between maternity and 18 years,” Kennedy said during a recent Senate hearing about Trump’s 2026 health-care agenda, by way of comparison with children of the past, who were required to receive fewer vaccines (if any at all). Likewise, Kennedy has rejected the introduction of fluoride into drinking water, a practice initiated in the mid-1940s to help prevent tooth decay, as well as the pasteurization of milk, which began in the late 19th century. “When I was a kid” in the ’50s and ’60s, Kennedy said earlier this year, “we were the healthiest, most robust people in the world. And today we’re the sickest.”[Read: How RFK Jr. could eliminate vaccines without banning them]This is in some respects true, but in other ways dangerously wrong. Kennedy is quick to point out the relative rarity of chronic conditions such as childhood diabetes and autoimmune disorders in the past. But he is apparently hesitant to acknowledge that mid-century America came with its own share of serious health problems, including a high rate of cigarette smoking and horrifying infant mortality rates compared with the present. When Kennedy was young, vaccine-preventable childhood illnesses such as measles routinely killed hundreds annually. So far this year, only three people in the United States have died of measles—largely the result of an outbreak of the disease caused in part by declining vaccination rates. And if modern innovations in food and medicine have come with their share of hazards, it would be wrong to conclude that their predecessors were superior. Raw milk allegedly caused the hospitalization of a toddler and the miscarriage of an unborn child as recently as this summer. At the center of the “Make America Healthy Again” crusade is a high degree of trust in the wisdom of nature. But the contemporary appeal of unadulterated nature springs from human successes in controlling the elements; it’s hard to romanticize a relatively recent vaccine-free past while considering photographs of children’s bodies ravaged by smallpox, a disease that persisted well into the 20th century. Likewise, long before COVID-19, America experienced cholera and flu pandemics with hundreds of thousands of associated deaths, as well as lesser outbreaks of illnesses such as diphtheria, polio, and pertussis, all three of which were notorious child-killers. Today, the rarity of those conditions has fostered a false sense of security, and a naive assessment of the natural world. Relinquishing the successes of general vaccine coverage, however, is guaranteed to belie the idea that untainted nature contains all the keys to health and wellness. Our historical moment has enough strife without revisiting past battles fought and won.*Illustration sources: The New York Historical / Getty; GHI / Universal History Archive / Getty; Bettmann / Getty.

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